Generative AI: The catalyst for intelligent collaboration today and beyond

Episode 150: Generative AI: The catalyst for intelligent collaboration today and beyond 

[00:00:00.000] – Oscar Berg

My belief that you need to have a culture that is open and fosters trust and collaboration to make use of our AI. That’s what I mean with Culture Eats AI for Breakfast. If your culture isn’t ready for AI, you will have a hard time finding value from AI and adopting it.

[00:00:25.050] – Nancy Goebel

In this episode of Digital Workplace Impact, we welcome Oscar Berg. He’s someone who’s been in and around DWG circles for many years, and most recently has not only continued his work as a senior consultant, but he’s also a renowned author content creator, and a speaker with extensive experience in both intelligent collaboration and AI. Our topic of the day for this episode is Generative AI, the Catalyst for Intelligent Collaboration today and beyond. This episode was inspired by one of my 2025 predictions for the digital workplace, which sets out the future of intelligent collaboration and how AI, specifically generative AI, is transforming team collaboration. As part of the conversation, we delved into the challenges and opportunities of AI-driven collaboration, talked through insights for navigating this evolving landscape towards achieving more advanced and intelligent teamwork. And I think you’ll find this session to be quite fascinating. Join me now in conversation with Oscar Berg. This is Nancy Goebel. DWG’s Chief Executive, and your host. As always, Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by Digital Workplace Group. Happy listening. Oscar, I have to say I appreciate that it’s been a while, but I’m so happy to be reconnected and have a chance to dip into some of your latest thinking.

[00:02:13.010] – Nancy Goebel

As context, I put out predictions for the digital workplace last fall for this year. And one of the predictions that I sketched out was the idea that intelligence collaboration is going to produce more advanced teamwork. As I was trying to think about potential studio guests who would be well placed to have a chat about that you immediately came to mind. I have to extend a warm welcome to you and offer my appreciation for being willing to step into what I like to call the golden fishbowl for just a little bit. And so certainly, we know that the digital workplace industry at large is changing very rapidly for a whole host of reasons. But of course, AI is a big piece of what’s dominating the conversation and scope nowadays. And so when I think about where we were last year, a lot of the conversation centered around how people were going to think differently about things like findability to surface content in new and different ways, powered by AI versus searchable. We saw all kinds of bots and agents and assistants trying to help people navigate their way through the digital workplace to get things done or to try to find a path to advice.

[00:04:06.910] – Nancy Goebel

Now it’s seemingly changing direction, and AI in the digital workplace is starting to permeate the collaboration space along with productivity in different ways. I’d love to get your read on how through your channels, you’re seeing AI come together to start to reshape both collaboration and productivity in the workplace. I’m sure that will lead us to lots of different ways to explore that space together while we’re gathered together.

[00:04:55.490] – Oscar Berg

Great. Thanks for having me here today. Looking forward to having this conversation with you on a subject that I’m really engaged in myself. I’ve, as you know, worked a lot with digital workplace and collaboration over the years, but now it’s pivoting to AI. It’s because not for the sake AI, for the sake of AI, but because I see the potential in improving both the digital workplace, the co-worker or employee experience and also facilitating collaboration. I wanted to be in this space, so I pivoted to that from more of the collaboration, digital workplace, pure digital collaboration area. But they are blending together, and that’s where I wanted to be in that development. From my point of view, I can just confirm what you’re saying that we are moving beyond this individual phase where we try to explore in an almost ad hoc manner how generative AI, specifically, but AI in general, how it can help us improve our work and our tasks. Now we’re moving ahead to see how can we collaborate better together using AI in various forms, both out of the box, this generative AI tools like ChatGPT or the enterprise-corresponding tool in the enterprise copilot, which is, I believe, the main tool.

[00:06:53.190] – Oscar Berg

That’s the one that I work with the most. But also that we’re seeing agents, various kinds of agents that’s popping up and that will help facilitate collaboration and workflows. There’s a lot of that coming this year, I believe.

[00:07:11.060] – Nancy Goebel

Can you think of some specific examples of emerging approaches to collaboration afresh with support from generative AI, just as a starting point?

[00:07:29.090] – Oscar Berg

Yes, I can see that it’s like one area is helping out with the facilitation on improving collaboration, communication within the team and helping agents and using for example, Copilot to keep track of what is happening in the team and how to coordinate stuff. But one thing that I’m really excited about is that we are starting to use also generative AI as a way to think about the work, to reflect upon a work, meta cognitive thinking. We’re not just doing things faster with generative AI or offloading things to generative AI. We are also rethinking how we can work together by asking these AI tools for advice and help us think how we can approach things in a different way. That’s a really interesting thing that I see in many of… I do a lot of pilots with companies like early adoption and moving beyond this individual exploration towards team-based exploration. It’s really interesting to see when they get it, when they see that it’s more than just an assistant. They can also use it to reflect upon their work and think picking new ways of their work. That, of course, includes collaboration, how they can think about collaborating with each other.

[00:09:09.330] – Oscar Berg

It can be as simple things as, How should I communicate this to the team members? Not just what tool to use, but how. How should I say it is? Becoming more like a coach and a colleague.

[00:09:27.800] – Nancy Goebel

We’re certainly kindred spirits in our approach to thinking about that because when I was doing some of my early road shows on the predictions and trying to help leadership teams internalize what the predictions would mean for their own organizations and even their own workings as a digital workplace team, I said that they should start to think about their generative AI tools like Copilot as an extension of the team. Just as you would ask your colleague to help you either summarize thoughts about a meeting or a document that you need help absorbing to documenting action steps, understanding risk points, but also starting to treat AI like a thought partner as you’ve said, to help instigate some reflective thinking or forward planning, to utilize that AI partner as a coach. I think over time, those coaching capabilities will go from a crawl to a walk to a run in terms of robustness. But if we build that muscle early on, where we’re thinking of generative AI as an extension of the team, our ability to move with the changes will become that much more fluid and more impactful as well. It’s very clear that we’re thinking along the same lines.

[00:11:18.350] – Nancy Goebel

I guess one of the things that is a challenge with any emerging technology is trying to help create a pathway for people to embrace and adopt new ways of working. Often, those of us who are there as stewards of the change or enablers of the change need to think very specifically about challenges. Based on your vantage view of things, what challenges do you foresee as organizations start to look for ways to integrate these more AI-driven or more intelligent collaboration capabilities.

[00:12:07.140] – Oscar Berg

One of the main challenges that I see is that they don’t really see the relationship between or the necessity of defining ways of working and agreeing upon ways of working. Many see just AI as a tool that can help solve things for them without any investment from from their side. I think it’s a little bit strange because if you look at the AI that we have had for a number of years, which is more the transactional AI, machine learning that analyze data from structured processes. There it’s all quite obvious that you need to have structured processes to create the data so that AI can analyze it and make use of and create value from it. But in this more in the collaboration or unstructured content and knowledge work space, we are still not really doing our homework when it comes to making sure that the information is organized at a basic level, at least. We need to create some order in the digital workplace and in our information environment. That starts with working in common ways. We have some shared ways of working. We don’t do everything as we think are best from our own point of view, but we actually agree upon certain things because that way we will also create better information, better organized information, less redundant information, higher quality information, and that will make AI better.

[00:13:57.870] – Oscar Berg

I see a challenge in the way organizations are approaching AI that they don’t really realize this, that they expect some magic bullet or silver bullet, a secret sauce to just solve these things. But they need to do the… Just like the large language models, they are pretrained with a lot of structured information or high-quality information. When we inject our work data into these large language models. It also needs to be high quality if we want to get high quality insights and actions out of it. That’s one of the main challenges that I see organizations are facing and that they need to take seriously. Then, of course, there’s this, as you know, adoption and change, that we need to change behaviors and not just behaviors, but ways of thinking, which is always challenging. It’s basically those two things that are the main challenges, I believe, going forward to make sure that we can make use of AI in the workplace.

[00:15:17.250] – Nancy Goebel

It’s almost as though, at least in the collaboration arena, that we have to recharge what teamwork looks like so that people see how to reimagine these dynamics, people dynamics, and people to AI dynamics in a whole new way and can start to even do a reboot on mindsets such that people feel more comfortable with experimentation. Experimentation with purpose, not experimentation just for the purpose of experimentation. People often talk about the fact that they’re overmeetinged. They don’t have time to think things through or to check in with colleagues. There is a window of opportunity to work differently to overcome these things. But it starts with being a bit more curious, a bit more experimental, and asking smarter and smarter questions of ourselves as part of a team and our AI partner. And so therein lies a chance to go from challenge to opportunity and then achievement and impact. Another challenge that I can think of is that there are some DWG members and practitioners from our wider circles who work in regulated industries, and every step of the way, they have talked about the fact that whether it was for some of the early experimental efforts around findability, around task assistance, that there has been a level of resistance to embracing AI to drive new ways of working.

[00:17:14.830] – Nancy Goebel

I was curious as to whether you might have some advice for navigating such tricky territory so that the digital workplace teams that are helping support and enable this with generating observations of change might allow for the conversation to open and help bring those individuals, experts from legal risk and compliance into the change paradigm so that organizations can be risk smart as opposed to change resistant.

[00:17:54.930] – Oscar Berg

I agree, totally agree. But I don’t think that the legal risk and compliance teams that they are typically opposed to AI, but they are rather opposed to this uncontrolled risk that they see comes with it, that they are not involved in the discussion upfront. One way to address this, the key way to address this, is to involve them early on in the conversation and have them more as co-designers of safe and responsible AI implementation, and instead of them becoming blockers later on in the process, so to speak. Fundamentally, I think everyone who works with risk or legal. They understand that their role is to enable an organization to create value. It’s not to stop it from creating value. On that level, I think they understand that their objective, their purpose is not to be blockers. That way, if you just involve them and also show that there are ways to mitigate these risks. Many of these risks that are bouncing around are almost myths. I can see that in even large organizations, they believe things that are not true. If you use copilot on In the web, for example, in the browser, information will leak or Microsoft will get hold of the information.

[00:19:39.660] – Oscar Berg

But if you look into their responsible AI principles and the security architecture of Microsoft 365 platform, for example, you will see that it mitigates those risks, for example, by Microsoft not being allowed to or not being able to view your information in your tenant, in your environment. I see these concerns being spread around, and it’s really important to start a conversation before they become truths. That’s the reason why you should involve not just legal and security and compliance teams, but also experts in AI and these platforms. You have all the expertise there to mitigate any risks. Because, of course, many of the organizations that have these concerns, they are not the only ones. There are organizations in these industries that have mitigated their risks already. Another advice is to learn and talk to those who have instead of just looking at their own business and seeing that it’s unique. It’s not. Typically, there are lots of organizations out there with the same challenges and same regulations and need for high-level security. You can learn from the other organizations and, of course, the vendors and the practitioners out there.

[00:21:26.260] – Nancy Goebel

I think there are a few really powerful nuggets in what you’ve shared that not only apply to regulated industries, but to the wider scope of organizations as well, because that early engagement with your key partners across legal risk compliance is important, drawing upon those who are steps ahead of you, whether it’s your vendor partners or others in your peer circles to help establish confidence with the partners from those areas that are designed to help manage risk for the organization. And I also think there’s some art to how you engage those colleagues because, A, you need to show you’ve done your homework to recognize your point, but also I think when you approach these players to say, as an organization, we have a mandate, because in many cases, this is coming from the board level or the executive committee level, that AI needs to become part of how a company works. The question needs to be addressed from the point of view of how can we be risk smart versus asking for permission to do this, because that’s very different. That early engagement is absolutely essential, but also the space is so fast-changing, fast-moving, that any risk smart strategy that you put in place on day one needs to be evergreen So it’s not just engaging those partners who are adept at risk management internally and externally to start, but over the life of the project or program, as the case might be, so that there is an ongoing focus that is in line with how the company’s risk profile is changing, as well as the capabilities, risk profile is changing.

[00:23:46.950] – Nancy Goebel

Long term partnership is also part of the equation.

[00:23:50.710] – Oscar Berg

I also see that often there’s a lack of knowledge or insight into how these technologies work. Again, I will use Copilot as an example. Sometimes they believe that it’s a new way to access your information, but it actually builds on top of existing security architecture and compliance architecture. It’s more or less like a search tool in that way, that it can only see what you can see from the search. It’s just that it generates information from that. Also, you might discover things that are not as easily discovered using search. That makes a lot of people in organization I’m afraid of. Now, Copilot is dangerous, but what it actually does is to bring this up to the surface, things that are already bad in their environment If they find the information that you shouldn’t have access to, it’s because you have access to information that you shouldn’t have access to. It’s not Copilot’s fault. I think a lot of the fear or the resistance towards these new technologies is based on a lack of having things in order in your environment. If you would have really control of things, you wouldn’t see this and you understood what it does.

[00:25:34.260] – Oscar Berg

You wouldn’t be afraid. But now it can become transparent and other people can see that you don’t have control of your information, that you don’t have access rights properly set up, et cetera, and that you manage, that you have information stored in the wrong places. It’s just brings this up to the surface. But if you go to organizations that have invested a lot in security, governance already, they are much more eager or willing to implement these technologies because they have control over their environments. That’s also a factor to consider that it’s not a technology that creates new risks in that respect, it just exposes the vulnerabilities that already exist.

[00:26:37.050] – Nancy Goebel

There’s almost a microscope effect where suddenly you see what was already there and start to look at what structure, to your point, governance needs to be put in place for the next stage of maturity around how information needs to be safeguarded and utilized because it’s almost like spinning a Rubik’s Cube, right? And you have a new picture in front of you, and suddenly you have clarity around the fact that you have work to do at a foundational level before you can support and enable next stage utilization of content, data that’s wrapped around the content to form knowledge in the organization that you need to tap in new and different ways. I think when you break it down in that simple terms like that, it feels more approachable. I think that there’s also that fear factor and human element that is worth spending a little bit more time exploring with you because, of course, there is the whole notion of FOBO, fear of becoming obsolete. People need to become students of AI because if they don’t take those progressive steps, somebody else who has that skill set can and will. And so you need to future-proof yourself, number one.

[00:28:15.200] – Nancy Goebel

But also, I really think that there’s an opportunity to unlock people’s superpowers in the sense that we’re, especially in the knowledge worker lane, so consumed by meetings that we don’t have time to think and create and innovate and plan. And so in this collaboration space in particular, there’s an opportunity to level up and allow ourselves to get to the things that we always say we want to have time for but haven’t had that. I also know that you have recently talked about the idea that culture eats AI for breakfast, and it feels an interesting theme to bring into the conversation now. Tell us what that means to you and what advice people should take from that in looking at the challenges paradigm and opportunities for that matter.

[00:29:15.810] – Oscar Berg

Well, thank you. The idea or thought or this whole thing comes from my belief that you need to have a culture that is open and fosters trust and collaboration to make use of AI. If you don’t have that, you don’t have access to information. Ai is really an enhancer of our skills, as you mentioned, the superpower, it can become a superpower. We can extend our abilities both as individuals and as groups and as an organization. To be able to do that, we need to have a certain culture. We need to be collaborative, open, and have a dynamic mindset and so forth. If you don’t have that, then you won’t get value from AI. In fact, you will react to this like for some foreign virus entering your body and the immune system goes crazy and it tries to get rid of the virus because that’s how this… If the culture isn’t ready for AI, it will react like that. That’s what I mean with culture eats AI for breakfast. If your culture isn’t ready for AI, you will have a hard time finding value from AI and adopting it. A lot of organizations.

[00:30:46.820] – Oscar Berg

Another thing that I thought about just a few minutes ago was the challenges that I mentioned. They are really related to not investing and not being ready to invest in this. Invest time and energy yourself into learning and exploring the artificial intelligence, but also from an organizational perspective that you need to invest in this. You need to create space for people to learn and explore and find these new ways of working. If you don’t have it in your culture to do that, if you just always trying to squeeze the most out of every hour during the day, you will be stuck in this old ways of working. I use this image of a cartoon of two people, Stone Age people rolling a wheel, a barrel, with square wheels. There’s another one person coming up to them with a round circle wheel and asking them why If they want it, want to use it, that instead. They reply, We don’t have the time, so we have too much to do. You don’t want to have that culture because then you’re not going to embrace these opportunities. That culture often comes from this leadership, how you incentivize people, how the whole organization is built and designed.

[00:32:37.280] – Oscar Berg

That, of course, is a major challenge if you have that culture. It’s a major blocker to getting value from AI. Specifically this AI that we’re talking about, which is more, I call it relational AI, or that is more about helping us collaborate and helping us become more creative as opposed to transactional AI, where you just want to improve the efficiency of processes. Those organizations will be able to implement transactional AI, but not this relational AI that is really about empowering us as people and groups.

[00:33:26.490] – Nancy Goebel

Just pulling on the empowerment string for a moment, what do you think are some strategies that leaders can employ in order to help set the tone that encourages employees to embrace and to utilize AI for collaboration in particular?

[00:33:54.610] – Oscar Berg

Well, I think as you know, collaboration is the key to collaboration is to have a shared goal. If you don’t have that, you’re probably not collaborating. You’re just cooperating maybe because you have different goals, but you see a value in aligning your efforts. The same thing applies to driving AI adoption is that you have to have a goal or vision that is clear and engaging. You’re really connected to that, not just implementing a new technology to do a bit of this and that to improve productivity or whatever, but that you have a clear vision how this can improve your business and improve collaboration in this case and connect everything to that because I think that’s what’s missing. If you don’t see value in it for yourself and also you don’t see value in it for you as a group, then of course, it’s going to be hard to get people to adopt it. You need really to create that vision. That’s something that I’ve observed has been lacking in a lot of initiatives around AI. They’re just testing things out. Sometimes you need to do that with a new technology, just see if it works.

[00:35:19.230] – Oscar Berg

But now, much of it is already built, so it’s more about finding your use for it. Then we need to have a clear vision and an idea of how do we want to use this. For example, with the meetings that you mentioned, why are we implementing AI? Is it so we can have more efficient meetings to have more meetings, or is it to offload us and not have so many meetings and do more valuable stuff instead? How would the future look like where you don’t have spend your all entire days in meetings, but instead could have more focus time, deep thinking, and maybe even more free time, because it’s not a necessity that you need to put all the time back, like to fill it up because we know that that doesn’t make you productive. You have to have some slack. That you need to build as a leader. You need to have an understanding of human nature and collaboration, what makes collaboration work and make it effective and efficient. You need to factor that into a vision so you can communicate that to your co-workers. That, to me, is what leadership is about, is to show the way, like other people, the way, influence them to take steps in that direction.

[00:36:56.820] – Nancy Goebel

To put an exclamation point on that, the idea is that you have to begin with the end in mind, and the end is the purpose, what you’re trying to achieve. Then the overlay is that you have to help translate that purpose or vision into the with them, right? What’s in it for me so that I, as part of the team, understand where I fit into the bigger picture. And if you don’t add that second layer, then it feels like a foreign thing that the leader is trying to achieve and doesn’t bring the individuals along for the ride because they don’t understand their part in supporting and enabling that bigger program of work. So that’s a very powerful insight, Oscar. I naturally feel like I have to ask a clickdown question, which is whether you have any additional advice to add to those who are leading the charge on some of these initiatives, in other words, digital workplace leaders as opposed to leaders at large?

[00:38:20.240] – Oscar Berg

Yeah, I think the digital workplace is at the very heart of this transformation I think showing what’s possible and creating a vision around that, I think it doesn’t need to come from the business in the way that… I think as digital workplace managers or owners, we have a quite holistic view of the workplace. I think sometimes just being trying to help the business understand how a vision could look like. It’s something that I’ve worked a lot with when it comes to the digital workplace as such, like I would say, for AI, that to gather different stakeholders in the business and create the vision for the digital workplace. So you co-create that vision. That’s a key role, I believe, for for anyone who’s responsible for the digital workplace to be able to frame how the digital workplace can support the overall strategies and goals of the organization and create this holistic vision. I believe also for AI that you need someone to take that role, someone to drive that. I don’t see where it would come from, who would drive it? Would it be HR or would it be communications or would it be a business area?

[00:40:06.200] – Oscar Berg

I’m not sure. I think someone needs to step up and at least facilitate this process, not It will not necessarily be the one that decides on how that vision should look like, but someone who facilitates it and puts all these possibilities into the business perspective as opposed to the traditional way of working that you have IT and you have system owners, and then you have businesses coming to IT and asking for solutions, we need to be much more proactive and work together to shape this new workplace that we will see evolving.

[00:40:53.300] – Nancy Goebel

The digital workplace in and of itself is a portfolio, and by its very nature, there are stakeholders from across HR and IT and communications, knowledge management, et cetera. But when you think about the human element, someone has to come forward to be the steward who unlocks the clarity and collaboration for the digital workplace stakeholders in and of themselves And that needs to be someone who’s a passionate advocate to help bring everybody together to look at the collective interests of the employee experience versus looking at their individual interests on behalf of HR, communications, et cetera, because the only way to reduce the friction and to create a frame for enablement and empowerment requires that crossfunctional and holistic view that you talked about at the start of this conversation. And so I think that’s a very powerful takeaway as well. Of course, part of what you shared from the leadership lens was the idea of vision. And so I have to ask you to do a little bit of future-gazing and share whether you have a vision, maybe even a wish or an ambition, for what you think advanced teamwork, intelligent teamwork, might look like between now and, say, 2030.

[00:42:44.180] – Oscar Berg

Well, let’s that’s a big challenge to envision. But I would like to start with where I see the most potential for improvement when it comes to collaboration in general. Especially in this hybrid remote where we distributed the work force is distributed. We have to work with… Even if we would spend our time five days in an office. In most organizations, you will need to interact with and collaborate with people from across different locations and sometimes even time zones. The main challenge there is workplace awareness to understand what’s happening both in the team and outside of the team. That’s often one reason why organizations want to bring people back to the office, because at one point in time, it was quite easy to get a workplace awareness, at least what’s happening around in your close physical proximity. But as we have become more and more and the work has become more digital, it’s harder and harder to build this workplace awareness. This is where I believe AI can create the most impact because you can have an AI that not just knows everything that happens in your team and what you need to do, but in all teams in the entire organization, and that understands your personal style of working, your preferences, how you feel, it basically knows you.

[00:44:38.960] – Oscar Berg

If you put all those things together, someone who understands the full context who understands you, who understands the team, then you will have a whole new level of collaboration, one where you can have smooth and efficient collaboration within a team, but also across teams and you’re aligned. This is the main problem I see in collaboration today, especially as we get more and more interdependent. Changes are happening faster and the world is becoming more and more uncertain. This constant coordination that requires you to have this workplace awareness. In my vision, we can focus on creating value, doing meaningful things, and less about trying to find information and ask people what’s happening.

[00:45:39.250] – Nancy Goebel

Well, that’s a vision that I could sign up for. I am conscious that we’re approaching the end of our time together, Oscar. And so is there a final thought, a question, a piece of advice you’d like to leave behind for our listeners?

[00:46:01.010] – Oscar Berg

I would say that we all need to think about our role in this. Also, it comes back to what you talked about earlier, that we need to understand that this is a transformative time where we need to invest now. We are not surprised when change happens, but we are prepared and we have equipped ourselves with enough knowledge and skills and the right mindset to use this transformative technology to our benefit. Otherwise, it might come as a shock that some will be empowered by it and you might lose your job. Unfortunately, in all these structural changes in the economy. It’s not that work disappears, it’s just that it changes and you’d have to follow along.

[00:47:10.640] – Nancy Goebel

I think that’s a perfect way to cap off our time together. A window of opportunity to thank you for stepping out of your busy day to share some of what you’re thinking about, your insights, and your best advice And I feel like we’ve had a window into all of those things in the course of this conversation today. So thank you for that, Oscar.

[00:47:41.830] – Oscar Berg

Thank you very much, Nancy. It was very nice and it’s been an interesting and fun discussion to have with you. So happy to have hopefully contributed with a few thoughts that could be useful.

[00:47:58.790] – Nancy Goebel

Digital Workplace Impact is brought to you by the Digital Workplace Group. DWG is a strategic partner covering all aspects of the evolving digital workplace industry, not only through membership, but also benchmarking and boutique consulting services. For more information, visit digitalworkplacegroup.com.